Over the limit. participatory artistic practices on resistance to food waste and heroic agriculture

Artistic experiences - During the 20th century, food assumed a central role in the imagination and the marketplace, so much so that its relationship with arts was celebrated at the 2015 Milan Expo. The growing awareness concerning the issue of wastefulness in the capitalist system has generated artistic experiences that have used food as raw material (a practice that, in different ways, runs throughout the entire century). In the 1990s, food and its sharing shaped the basis of artistic projects that defined relational aesthetics through forms of participation. Political and social observation of these phenomena produced "culinary" metaphors about the relationship between the Western world and other cultures, such as the one proposed by the exhibition Cocido y Crudo in Madrid (1993-94), which interpreted in this sense Lévi-Strauss' famous essay Le Cru et le Cuit. In recent years, artists have dealt with the Anthropocene and a broader idea of natural resource exploitation, using technologies and storytelling to raise awareness and denounce industrial production systems.
Documentary production - We recall how, in recent years, several documentaries have been produced to raise awareness on the issue of food loss and waste, mainly focused on extensive food recycling and reuse projects: Still Hungry (Ryan William Harris, 2021), which shows how every year 1.3 billion food products are wasted, and this generates tons of carbon dioxide; Green Storytellers - Food Rescue (2021), a docu-series in six episodes directed by Marco Cortesi and Mara Moschini, two travelers who cross Italy to discover the great projects to safeguard food; Hungry for Waste (Maite Carpio, 2015) a reportage through Italy, from the fields to our tables, in which three stories of women in Italy intertwine with the lives of two young women in Chad; Wasted! (Anna Chai and Nari Kye, 2018) an intercontinental journey that Anthony Bourdain undertakes with other chefs to promote the conscious use of food and demonstrate how it is possible to create a more sustainable food system.

Our project aims at realizing two different actions of participatory artistic action: i. artworks on topics that preferably use new technologies such as 360-degree video, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). The works produced by artists through calls for proposals will result from participatory practices and local actions to be developed with different communities and paying attention to the documentation of production processes; ii. A VR documentary on the themes of food waste and heroic agriculture in Italy, according to the model of the investigation film, to tell - from an ethnographic perspective - little-known realities of daily resistance to waste and inventive capacity for recycling and cultivating in extreme conditions.

ATELIERS
1st phase: mapping of artistic experiences on the topic
2nd phase: conception of the calls for proposals and planning artworks
3rd phase: development of artworks in specific contexts
4th phase: public dissemination and restitution of artist projects

VR DOCUMENTARY
1st phase: ethnographic research on food waste resistance practices and forms of heroic agricultural in contexts of food poverty and marginalization
2nd phase: writing of the documentary project, with the finalization of the shooting schedule.
3rd phase: shooting in the field.
4th phase: editing and post-production
5th phase: site-specific visions in VR

This multidisciplinary project aims to design dissemination and information tools to stimulate the active participation of different target groups to a) promote healthy and sustainable nutritional behaviors and b) prevent food waste.
Particularly, the ethnographic basis of the documentary aims to collect unknown material on spontaneous and bottom-up practices. Moreover, this setting allows a participatory project by the subjects involved and enhances their experience. Lastly, thanks to the VR visions, the project's restitution to the communities involved aims to experiment with new forms of involvement and belonging.